


The Girl Who Failed

by CenozoicSynapsid



Category: The Instrumentality of Mankind - Cordwainer Smith
Genre: Dubious Ethics, Gen, Mass Death, Number-names, Underperson, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-18
Updated: 2019-12-18
Packaged: 2021-02-18 07:04:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,702
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21840232
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CenozoicSynapsid/pseuds/CenozoicSynapsid
Summary: The expedition succeeded: on that, all the witnesses agree. Even Lady Mmona, who warned so direly at the outset. Even Lord Jestocost, who was personally responsible for the cleanup...“It went wrong,” said the girl Santuna at the inquest. “And it was my fault it went wrong. If that was a success, I want no more successes.”
Comments: 10
Kudos: 13
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	The Girl Who Failed

**Author's Note:**

  * For [raspberryhunter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/raspberryhunter/gifts).



The expedition succeeded: on that, all the witnesses agree. Even Lady Mmona, who warned so direly at the outset. Even Lord Jestocost, who was personally responsible for the cleanup, and emerged from that ravaged and partial ship with eyes, so onlookers said, like the clouds of a summer rainstorm. It was a success, and a glorious one at that.

“It was Pym Quake who pulled them through”, said Lord Hanaset, towards the end of his long life. “I have known the great captains of my age: John Joy Tree and Dita from the Great South House. If there ever was anyone worthy to make a third in that list, it would be Pym Quake. If we had not sent him, the whole thing would have failed utterly.”

“He was a romantic,” said Lady Mmona, and she swept her hand in a great arc, like a dancer. “That sort of person always takes more credit than their share. Remember, we sent the girl Santuna with him, and she had no small part in what happened.”

“It went wrong,” said the girl Santuna at the inquest. “And it was my fault it went wrong. If that was a success, I want no more successes.”

Lord Hanaset and Lady Mmona were dumbfounded when she said it, and even Lord Jestocost was not certain of what she meant— not till long afterwards. But after she became a Lady of the Instrumentality, and took the name Alice More, she refused to speak any further on the subject.

* * *

It began with a cruiser of the Instrumentality, and a probe, or the wreck of a probe. “Save us,” the thing was transmitting. The message crossed all frequencies, and repeated every minute or two. “Save us…”

They brought the probe aboard and cut the pilot out of it with torches. He was a crazed skeleton of a man, and he reeked of fever-sweat. When they peeled away his helmet, his eyes rolled madly back and forth, blind as a pair of marbles. They were quietly kind to him for a week or so. “Turn down the lights,” he said. “Turn down the lights and leave me in the dark.”

They turned them down, so far down that they had to send cat-nurses to tend him with their night-sight. “Turn down the lights,” he cried, and turned his face towards the pillow.

“His optic nerves are burned out, poor guy,” said the doctors to one another. 

“What about a telepath?” one of them suggested. The telepath reached out to him, and what he saw, by direct mind-to-mind contact, put him in bed for a week, in a dark room with tape over the crack at the bottom of the door. But the pilot seemed calmer. They got the whole story from him after that.

* * *

He had come from the Galactic Core. The cruiser-men were amazed; they had never thought such a thing was possible. Take all the stars of the night sky of Old Earth— not the sky as it is now, lamp-dulled, smoke-shaded, criss-crossed with aircraft and sectored by the great sky-highways leading up to the massive inverted bell of Earthport. Take the stars of the First Sky, dancing gently across the dark, as thick as the snowflakes in a blizzard.

Now press them together. Shrink the whole blizzard into the space between a man’s spread hands, every flake still separate, every flake still dancing. By the same degree, shrink the sky. That is the Core.

The colony he had come from was a young one, but it had a long and unlikely history. It had been founded by sailship: one of the old, old ships that took half a lifetime to travel between the stars. Sometimes the pilots of these ships would fail, and the passengers, each sealed asleep in his lifepod, would float off between the stars and die. The pilot of this ship had failed. By some disastrous mischance, the passengers had lived.

Drifting in a tangle of cut lines, the castaways had floated toward the Core. Through eight thousand years, unguessed at, unremembered, they slept their pod-sleep. At last the lines had snarled against a dark little fragment of an asteroid. Then the robots had come awake. They couldn’t know that the colony was lost, nor that the dark little world was doomed. Cruelly, without knowing they were being cruel, they woke the people and set about building a society for them.

It had taken a generation for the colonists to learn the full immensity of their fate. All that time, they had lived in the space between the stars of the core, orbiting no sun. They had not felt its lack; the starlight of the Core is warm and bright as noonday on a sandy beach. In that bright and unceasing noontime they built mines and houses and farms. They ran about like happy children, playing families. They set up a school, and one of the young women turned to astronomy.

Her name was Susannah: she had an old-style name, since they had left Old Earth before the fashion of number-names. The robots tutored her in calculus and stellar mechanics. The edu-tapes they played for her were old and more than half-corrupted by eight thousand years of storage. In the end, she rediscovered much of it on her own. She would have been proud of that, if she had had the time. But she hadn’t. For the Core was drawing their little world down, down, toward its incandescent center.

“Can we go around it?” the leaders of the colony asked her. She stared at them incredulously.

“Ask something else. Something sensible.”

“Are you certain?”

Patiently, knowing the price of every theorem or example was another precious minute, she laid out her calculations. Exhausted, they bowed their heads to her in defeat.

“Can you save us? If not, we don’t see why you told us any of this. We would rather have died unworried. But surely you can save us?”

“We will call for help,” she said. “Though I warn you, help may not come.”

The colony had turned all its effort to making probes, each one crewed by a single volunteer, each one to be shot out in a different direction. The pilot they took aboard the cruiser did not know what had become of the others. The cruiser-men searched and found nothing. None of the rest of them were ever recovered.

* * *

Help had to be sent. The Lords and Ladies of the Instrumentality agreed thus far.

“We must send Pym Quake. Nobody else could do it,” said Lord Hanaset.

“That is the problem,” Lady Mmona replied. “He might do it, and he will try to do it. We should send a lesser man. Someone with limits.”

“That would be giving up before we start,” said Lord Nuru-Or.

“We’ll compromise. You two can have your choice of captain, and I’ll pick him an adjutant. Someone to balance him.”

They searched in the Bell for a candidate.

“There is the girl Santuna,” said Lady Mmona. “Sto Odin spoke of her in his last message to me. He said we should give her some task, a dangerous one if we could find it.”

“Did he have some grudge against her?” asked Lord Hanaset.

“We cannot know. He died just after he sent it.”

They sent for the girl Santuna. She came before them, gold-skinned, bald-headed. She wore no cosmetics. She had wrapped herself in a brown robe, made of something like sackcloth.

“Is this how you dress to meet the Lords and Ladies of the Instrumentality?” asked Lord Nuru-Or.

She scanned her brown eyes down the line of them, slowly. She’s beautiful, thought Lady Mmona. She’s a fool if she thinks that wretched sack is enough to hide it.

She’s assessing us, thought Lord Jestocost. Is she brave, or mad, to eye us so blatantly?

“It is how I dress, these days,” said Santuna. “I mean nothing by it.”

“We are sending you on a journey,” said Lady Mmona. “You will go aboard a planoform ship. You will travel to the Galactic Core. There is a lost colony there, and it is our duty to bring them back; that is why we are sending you. If they cannot be saved, you must leave them and save yourselves. That is cruel, but it is an order.”

“Why must I?” asked Santuna. “Why must I live, if I cannot risk my own life? Once I was safe and small and happy, and it chafed at me until I sought death. I want to live, now. But I want a life with a purpose to it.”

“Risks!” the Lady replied. She snorted derisively.

“Oh, you’ll take risks. We want you to take risks. What you must not do is throw the ship away for nothing. We are sending you as adjutant to Pym Quake, the Go-Captain. He is a romantic.”

“Perhaps I am a romantic,” said the girl.

“I have read your history in the Bell,” said the Lady. “You were a romantic— once.”

* * *

The planoform ships sat humming on their pads. They were going as a fleet of four: three to carry extra fuel along the way, and the one which was going on into the Core The three other ships were loading their usual crews. At the fourth ship, Santuna found a great crowd of underpeople milling about at the gangway, each holding a shapeless bag or package stuffed with tools and clothing. A dog-forewoman was herding them into teams. She was an old, tough-looking woman, with short grey hair like steel wool. She called out in a loud, hoarse voice:

“Anyone worked with food before? Cleaning? Cooking? Fixing the dispensers? Hands— up!”

A few hands raised, tentatively, among the crowd.

“You three, then. You— the cat-man— you’re gang boss. Pick another four people. You’re team fifty-six, assigned to the galley. Go aboard!”

Santuna shoved through the crowd until she was face to face with the dog-woman.

“I am Santuna,” she said. “You will have heard of me?”

“Yes,” she said, raising her hand to silence the crowd. “You’re second in command. I am D’Martha, the forewoman.”

“Why are these underpeople here? Where is the regular crew?”

“They won’t be risked, for a dangerous mission. Only the Captains and the Pinlighters, who can’t be replaced. Don’t worry, though. These,” she waved at them, “will work hard and learn quickly.”

“What about you?” asked Santuna.

“Oh, me,” said D’Martha. “I’m an old hand. I’ve been on three of these things before. Don’t you worry about me.”

Santuna thought: her voice grows tired when she talks of herself. Perhaps she is bitter.

“Carry on,” she said. She went up into the ship.

* * *

They called first at Abendrot, on the far rim of Instrumentality space. Here two of the ships would leave them and the other two go on. Pym Quake sat in the planoforming room with his Stay-Captains, plotting the next phase of the journey against the star charts which lined the whole wall of the room. For the ship to travel, they needed to know where they were; for that, they studied the charts in minute detail.

Santuna had seen little of the Captain so far. She and D’Martha were busy supervising the underpeople, as they off-loaded fuel from the two ships that were leaving and loaded it onto the two that would continue. The work gangs surged back and forth across the landing field. D’Martha had been right: they worked hard, and they learned quickly. They chanted a low, thumping chorus as they carried their loads:

Wait, fire, wait! Wait, fire, wait!

“What is that they sing?” asked Santuna.

“Anything that comes into their heads,” D’Martha replied. “It is a harmless custom, and it keeps them in step. But I will put a stop to it if you like.”

“I did not mean that. I was only curious. What is this fire they sing of?”

“The incinerator which burns us when we die. They mean that they are still alive, for the time being.”

Santuna shook her head. “How long will the loading take?”

“They will be done shortly. This is the next-to-last of it.”

Santuna nodded. “Very well. When you are done, give them eight hours shore leave, while the Captains finish in the chart room. But make sure you tell them all, it will go badly for anyone who reports late.”

D’Martha’s brown eyes widened in her grey face. “Shore leave? What use is it giving them shore leave? Is there any place in Abendrot they could go? Is there anyone who would serve them?”

“That’s their problem and not mine,” said Santuna. “I suspect there are such places, if you know where to look. Anyway there is the sunset.”

She tilted her face towards it. The sunsets on Abendrot were slow and delicate and apricot-colored. There were always a few wispy clouds, but never very many. A warm wind was blowing over the landing field, smelling of salt water. The great ball of the sun, larger and redder than the sun of Old Earth, sank slowly below the horizon. The sun of Abendrot is old and dim. It is possible to look directly into it for a few seconds at a time, tracing the gaseous seas and islands of its surface. Some who have looked claim to have seen sun-whales.

“What use are sunsets to them?” asked D’Martha.

“I do not know,” Santuna admitted. “I do not even know what use they are to me. I was in love once, and I gave my man all the hours and days of my lifetime. Now he is gone, and in his place I have nothing but a task to do. A task is not a life. Perhaps sunsets can make a life and perhaps they can’t. Let them figure it out as they like, so long as they are back on board in eight hours.”

“They will be,” said D’Martha. The old dog-woman raised her face for a moment into the sunlight. Like an ancient river delta shone the lines on her cracked skin.

* * *

They called next at a place without a name. It was a tiny moon of a bloated gas planet on the rim of the Core. There was no port and no air; the underpeople set up a makeshift dome and pumped a little atmosphere into it for breathing, before they set about loading the fuel from the third ship into the last one. Another gang of them was put to work setting up a great clanking and belching machine, which squatted on six metal limbs just outside the dome.

“What piece of equipment is that?” Santuna asked the Go-Captain, looking down at it from the chart room window. “I have never seen such a thing before.”

Pym Quake smiled. He was a handsome man, long-faced, blue-eyed and sandy-haired, broad in the chest. He sat in the Captain’s seat in the chart room. On one side of him was the window and on the other his wall of maps. He lounged easily in his great thronelike chair, but he did not look lazy doing it.

“I invented it myself. It is a Cartographic Foundry, although usually I just call it the Maw. Watch!”

On back of the Maw were two openings, sealed by metal doors. Pym Quake pulled a lever on the chair and both sprang open. Behind one was a lens. Behind the other was the glow of a furnace.

“The stars of the Core are visible from here. We must plan our route before we can travel; the Maw watches the sky, records, and prints out the maps. They must be very large and very accurate, or we will be lost.”

“The stars of the Core move,” said Santuna. “Does your Maw account for that?”

“It does,” said Pym Quake. “The maps it makes are very complex. We will use half the mass of this little rock to make them, and the force of our takeoff will probably shatter what is left into smithereens, so if there is anything of the surface you wish to see, you had better go see it.”

“There is nothing to see on the ground,” said Santuna. “But the sky is very bright and brilliant. When I stare into it, I feel joyful and eager to be of service, as I did when my lover was alive, though I do not even know whom I wish to serve.”

“We are brave people,” said the Captain. “There is joy in being brave and unafraid to die. We will go into the Core together, as soon as the maps are ready.”

“I am glad,” said Santuna. “But Lady Mmona instructed me that the ship was not to be thrown away. If you cannot do it, you must tell me and we must not go.”

“I can do it,” said Pym Quake. “You cannot doubt me, can you?”

“I cannot,” Santuna admitted.

* * *

At the end of a month there was little left of the tiny moon, little but the dome, and the ship, and an armature of rock that held up the Maw and the heaps of slag it had exuded around itself. The maps had been loaded into the wall of the planoforming room. Pym Quake had consulted the Stay-Captains and the Pinlighters. All was made ready to launch.

At the last minute before the bridge was cleared for takeoff, one of the Pinlighters raised a hand for attention.

“We’re picking up a signal, sir. It’s faint and far away, but perhaps…”

He pulled a lever, and the room was filled with a voice, married with the wailing threnody that is the song the Core sings across the radio spectrum. They did not know it then, but it was Susannah’s voice.

“Have you come? Do you even exist? Oh, I hope you have come. I hope you exist! But you must turn back. One of our power plants failed. The colony is gone. There are only twenty of us left, myself and a few women and children who got to a shelter before the air went bad. I would not ask you to risk the Core for twenty people, although I love you so much for coming, if you came, if you exist. I love you because you are brave and selfless and whether you exist or not. But you must turn back.”

The high shriek of the interference went on, one minute, two minutes. The voice did not resume. Pym Quake motioned for silence. Santuna noticed that the young Pinlighter was wiping his eyes on his sleeve and hoping not to be seen doing it.

“Shut that off,” said Pym Quake, gesturing at the Pinlighter.

“Yes sir.”

The noise shut off.

“Make ready for space,” said Pym Quake.

“Captain,” Santuna said. “You remember the orders I was given?”

“Do you love your own life so much?” asked the Captain. He smiled gently at her and spoke without raising his voice. “We can save that girl. You heard her— she loves us, and does not even know we exist! This is what separates us from ordinary people, who live because they must live, and are happy because they are made to be. We are people who dare. We are people who do things.”

“I want to believe that,” said Santuna.

“Believe it, then.”

“I will,” said Santuna. “I will. We will make ready for space.”

* * *

The journey into the Core took a second and a half: an endless, deadly second and a half. It is not difficult to skip into the Core from outside it, starting from a fixed frame of reference. Not difficult, but dangerous.

Two of the Pinlighters were psychotic when they arrived. Something out of space-2 had just barely brushed against them as they made their second skip. One was on his knees, howling out great sobs and then wheezing in mouthfuls of air to keep sobbing with. It was after he was sedated that they found the other one, huddled white-faced with terror in his seat.

Santuna went up to the medical bay and found the two strapped down to beds. There was a cow-person nurse with them, tucking them away under blankets. Santuna felt a brief shudder seeing an underperson touching real human people, but plainly the two were beyond such concerns. The other Pinlighters stood by helplessly, with sick looks on their faces.

One of them turned quietly to Santuna. He was barely a boy, she saw. “I’ve seen men who get it that bad,” he said in an undertone. “Do me a favor if I end up like that, and—”

He gestured at the wirepoint on his hip.

Then the door opened and the room filled with people. While Santuna had been tending to the Pinlighters, the rest of them had made contact with the lost colony, and brought up the survivors out of their shelter: Pym Quake himself had gone, and two of his Captains, and D’Martha’s strongest work crew. The survivors looked weak, and they tottered as they walked, but all twenty of them were there, looking about with amazement. Last of all came Susannah, leaning on Pym Quake’s strong arm. She had dark circles under her eyes, and her black hair was lank and greasy, but the smile on her face lit up the room like a beacon.

“I love you,” she kept saying to everyone. “You have to be mine now and never leave me. You have to be my family.”

“What is ‘family’?” asked one of the Stay-Captains.

“It’s an old word, for something like one-fathers and one-mothers,” said Santuna. “Maybe a few of the higher numbers as well, I can’t remember.”

“Is she raving, then? I never had any one-children, that I can think of. I was a three-father once, but I don’t know what came of it.”

Pym Quake smiled at the girl soothingly.

“Just lie down here, and we’ll take good care of you. But we have to ready the ship for our next transit. Is that all right?”

She clutched mutely at his hand, then nodded and let go. Slowly, he straightened.

“Back to your stations!”

With his hands clasped behind his back, he strode from the room.

* * *

Santuna went back to her cabin and stared at the wall. A thousand years passed. A second later, she felt the snap of the ship falling from space-2 into ordinary space. She rose to go to the planoforming room. If they had emerged from space-2, they were not lost, and if they were not lost they must be free. So she thought, at that moment. She put her hand on the doorknob.

A thousand years passed.

The knob turned.

She felt a stir of emotion, like cold water trickling across her throat. It was not fear. After a moment she recognized it. It was relief. She had been afraid before, without knowing it. Now that the worst had happened, she could thrust the fear aside.

She stood in the open door. The ship skipped once more— twice more. She waited a minute and no more skips came. She ran towards the planoforming room.

Pym Quake slumped in his seat, staring blankly at the floor. She went to him and laid a hand on his arm.

“Are we out? What has happened?” she asked him.

“Out? No. Not out.”

“Where then?”

“Here,” he cried, rising to his feet and striding to the viewport. He touched the opacity control— just touched it, so that it let in a hundredth of the light that fell on it. Santuna saw his handsome face lit up in a field of jewels. Beams of light stabbed across the room, falling on the wall of charts and on the dazzled faces of the Stay-Captains. Sharp stabbing blue, warm melting yellow, dim smoldering red, soft flickering white were the stars. In their majesty they made everything ugly. It was offensive of them to come so close, to shine so garishly. In their flickering light, the room twinkled and pulsed and grew unsolid. 

“There are too many of them,” moaned Pym Quake, and his face was horribly blue and yellow and red and white. The light painted him with sickly caricatures. Santuna ran to the viewport and turned it opaque again. She turned to Pym Quake and snapped harshly at him:

“What went wrong?”

“We’re lost,” he said helplessly. “I couldn’t do it. The maps are too complicated. The places are too similar. We came out of the skip, but we went to the wrong place and we’re still in the Core.”

“Can we skip again?”

He shook his head. “The tanks are all but drained. There’s no more than a whisper in them. I’ve failed you.”

“You?” she cried. “You? Fail me? Which of us was ordered to be cautious? Which of us was ordered to be cruel? If we are going to die, I killed us! I disobeyed my instructions! I broke my word! I and not you!”

She put her small golden hands to his shoulders and shook him, hard, so that he looked up helplessly into her burning brown eyes.

“Find us a course,” she said. “You will have one more chance and this time you had better succeed.”

“And you— what will you do?”

She had already gone.

* * *

Quickly she strode down the corridors of the ship, measuring in her mind the volumes and the surfaces she was passing by. She called for D’Martha, and for a chart that was not anywhere in the planoforming room: a chart of the structure of the ship.

“We must cut away the cargo holds and most of the crew space,” she said.

“You will instruct the work gangs.” On the chart of the ship, she indicated wounds, seals. Her golden fingers moved over the paper like knives.

D’Martha nodded. Her doggy eyes were full of terror.

“We will lose nine-tenths of the gas machines which make air for us to breathe. Nine tenths of your crews will stay behind. They will die, and we will escape. You may issue them drugs, or wirepoints, or whatever will ease them, but only once the job is complete. They are permitted their songs and their sentimentalities, but they must work. You may choose them as you please, so long as they are nine of every ten.”

D’Martha nodded.

“Speak! You must speak and obey.”

“Yes, Lady.”

Santuna scanned the woman’s lined face. She saw there a feeling she recognized, which was the foreknowledge of death.

“There is one more order, D’Martha.”

“Yes, Lady.”

“You may not choose yourself. You will live, because I need you.”

D’Martha’s lip curled back a bit from the white fang tooth at the corner of her mouth. If she had been a real dog, and not a dog-woman, she would have bitten me for that, thought Santuna. She put a tone of command into her voice.

“Go, then.”

She waited. From the belly of the ship came the clang of marching work-gangs, the reek and buzz of cutting torches, the scream of welding machines. Under it all came a deep, low song which rose and fell like the slow thump of a funeral drum.

Still she waited. The ship whined and buckled as the spars were cut. It writhed under the torture of slicing and sealing. The air grew close and stale. In the spaces between the shriek and groan of tearing metal came the beat of the song. In the spaces within the beat came the buzz of the torches.

Then there came a high, wild spasm of a chord, which no person in the world had ever heard before, or perhaps will hear again, for it was played on the instrument of a planoform ship, and it killed the ship that played it. It was the parting of the main spar, ringing like a plucked string in the resonant cavity at the heart of the ship. The walls of Santuna’s cabin echoed that chord. She breathed it into her lungs and felt it move across her.

After that, she heard no songs anymore and no buzzes. In the dark space of the planoforming room, she scanned the pale faces of the Captains. Pym Quake sat rigid in his great chair, his eyes fixed on the wall of charts, his hands clasping at the arm-rests. The muscles of his wrists stood out under his cuffs like twists of wire.

“The ship is lightened,” said Santuna. “Take us.”

Pym Quake took them. It is not written how he took them, by what unimaginable route or stratagem, through what myriad skips and counterskips. He did it: they arrived. For that alone Pym Quake would deserve to stand among the great captains, if he had done nothing else ever in his life.

What was left of the ship had to be towed in to landing. It laid on the pad at Earthport, with its cut and welded side facing up into the air like a monstrous scar. The Lords of the Instrumentality commenced an inquest.

Lord Jestocost went through the remains of the ship deck by deck. He examined all the charts on the wall of the planoforming room. They were dotted with stars thick as hairs on a head, and around each star was a spider web of notes and crochets, but he found no fault with them. He read the quartermaster records, of fuel loaded and fuel spent. He traced the long quicksilver fault where the cargo holds had been cut away. Along it he found four hundred and sixty-nine names, old style names and not numbers, where the cutting crews had signed their work with their torches. All this he reported to the tribunal.

The Lords called Santuna to the stand. She described in detail how she had cut off nine-tenths of a perfectly good planoform ship and abandoned it to drift around the suns of the Core. She explained how the twenty colonists were saved, and the two Pinlighters driven permanently psychotic, and the four hundred and sixty-nine miscellaneous underpeople chosen out from the crew and left behind.

“Never mind the ship,” said Lord Hanaset. “Never mind the Pinlighters or any of it.”

He smiled on her radiantly:

“For what purpose do you think this tribunal was convened?”

She tilted her head, considering. She is staring at a dog-woman, sitting high up in the gallery, thought Lord Jestocost. That is an odd thing to do at a time like this.

“I expect to be punished. I risked our lives and the ship, for nothing but twenty people, and came back with one-tenth of a ship and no crew. I failed, and I take full responsibility.”

“As you should,” chuckled Lady Mmona. “For your triumph, not your failure. You were sent to take risks, after all. If you had not come back, you would have deserved our punishment. Of course you would not have been here to undergo it, so it was a vain threat.”

“As threats often are,” observed Lord Jestocost, in his customary tone of dry sarcasm.

Lord Hanaset continued. “We have brought you here to swear your oath of service, in the hearing of thirteen Lords and Ladies of the Instrumentality. Henceforth you will be one of us.”

Santuna’s voice was unruffled:

“What shall I swear?”

“Whatever you like. You will have to hold yourself to it. We have no means of enforcing it, except the power of life and death, and the Roster of Dishonor. And we do not elevate anyone who is frightened of such trivial things.”

Santuna bowed her head and swore.

“If I am a Lady now,” she said—

“You are,” said Lady Mmona, and the tribunal echoed her.

“If I am a Lady, then here is my first command. Let Pym Quake take Susannah and marry her, Let him bring her to a place where there are green fields, and the sky is cloudy and not too bright even at noon. Let the rest of the colonists go with him.”

And this was done.

* * *

Lord Jestocost thought hard about the girl’s confession, and the bleak look that had been on her face when she made it, and who or what she might have thought that she had failed. He watched her slip out of the hall afterwards. He beckoned to a robot policeman who stood nearby and whispered to him:

“Follow at a distance, and record, but do not make yourself known.”

The robot followed through the narrow streets that bend downward and inward beneath Earthport. It became clear after a while that the girl was following an underperson, an old dog-woman who strode along steadily with her face turned to the pavement, bearing a much-patched and greasy bundle of tools and clothing. She did not acknowledge Santuna, though Lord Jestocost could see she seemed aware of her presence. Finally, Santuna spoke to her:

“I am going to take a name in the old style. I am sick of number-names.”

“That is for the best,” admitted D’Martha.

“If there is anything you would like to say to me, you should say it.”

“There isn’t.”

D’Martha kept up her pace, so that in the record she jerked in and out of the frame. The robot had focused on Santuna, who was almost trotting to keep up. The girl’s next words were not audible, only the dog-woman’s reply:

“I am not going to forgive you, and I am not going to hate you. I am not going to think of you ever again. I do not need you or want you. I have my own name and my own life.”

Here the conversation ended. Lord Jestocost turned to the robot policeman:

“You permitted the underperson to address a true woman in this manner?”

“You instructed me not to make myself known, Lord. Did I do wrong?”

The Lord made no reply, but he added this to his list of quandaries to puzzle over. He had come from the wreck of the ship clouded by a feeling he could not yet name. He meant to go off somewhere, somewhere he could be by himself, and think hard about it. And so he did.

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by your prompt about how Santuna became the Lady Alice More. And, perhaps more so, by your comment about "The always-ethical-but-frequently-magnificently-amoral Lords and Ladies of the Instrumentality! (Or perhaps the other way around?)" I think I stole the Galactic Core setting from Larry Niven, although who knows?
> 
> As you also mentioned, Cordwainer Smith has... problems... with his female characters. I didn't try to reproduce that. This is maybe a "what if Cordwainer Smith took acid and thought about intersectionality" AU. I hope you enjoy it.


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